PlusNet launches probe after broadband downtime

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PlusNet has launched a full investigation after two unrelated events led to customers losing their broadband connections.

A hardware failure at the weekend hit around 5,000 punters, while a separate incident yesterday meant that all PlusNet punters lost their connections for a couple of hours.

The Sheffield-based ISP, which has more than 176,000 broadband users, apologised for both incidents and will write to customers to explain what happened once its investigations are complete.

In a statement, PlusNet marketing director Neil Armstrong told us: "Last weekend we suffered a hardware failure which resulted in around 5,000 PlusNet broadband customers not being able to connect to the internet for several hours. Our engineers quickly remedied this using back-up equipment. This was compounded by one of our carrier suppliers suffering a network DNS issue, which meant some of our customers were unable to see certain web pages. Customers didn't lose overall connectivity as a result of this."

And then there was yesterday.

"Between 7am and 8.30am on Tuesday 8 March, all of our broadband customers lost internet connectivity as a result of planned maintenance on our network over-running from its intended 4am to 6am window," Armstrong said.

"This was compounded by all customers logging back in simultaneously - causing a further network failure. The result of this was that some customers were not able to connect to the internet until around 11am. However, the majority of customers were back online by 10am. Because of these issues, there were very high call volumes into our customer service centre resulting in long waiting times and some customers getting engaged tones."

"I'd like to sincerely apologise to customers who had connectivity problems and couldn't get through to our customer service centre on Tuesday morning," he said. ®